If you’ve watched Disney films like Cars and Hannah Montana: The Movie, you would have noticed that such films have an anti-corporate sentiment. In Cars, the idea of a “laid back small town life” is romanticized while the fast-paced big-city life is seen as needlessly chaotic.

In Hannah Montana: The Movie, the message is even more blatant. My friend and I, who watch bad movies as a hobby, sat down expecting to watch an hour and a half of stupidity; in addition to that, we got a hypocritical anti-corporate message.

Much of the film’s plot revolved around Hannah’s quest to stop a mall from being built in their small Tennessee town, which would effectively cripple local businesses.

It is incredibly ironic that the mall developers are portrayed as evil, considering that they are following the same business model as Disney. We’ve all grown up with Disney – it has become a corporation that is almost inescapable.

And for decades, Disney has had a monopoly on the children’s feature animation market.

Only recently have other studios started to make inroads, spurred largely by the success of DreamWorks’ Shrek franchise.

However, if one really wants to see Disney’s own insidious attempts at monopolizing and putting the little guy down, one only needs to look at their theme parks.

Disney has a model of copying their competition to ensure that nobody has any reason to leave Disney World in Florida. To combat Sea World, Disney built The Living Seas exhibit at Epcot.

Regardless of how much more money Disney World makes than surrounding theme parks, it seems as though they cannot stand the idea of people taking vacations to central Florida that are not Disney-exclusive. When I visited Disney World in 2000, I mentioned going to Cypress Gardens in front of a Disney hotel employee, while discussing the itinerary for the week with my parents.

The employee told me there would be no need to go to Cypress Gardens as there was enough to do in Disney World alone to last a week. I thought it was very nervy of her to suggest that, but then I remembered – she was probably supposed to suggest it. It was her job as a Disney employee to ensure that Disney gets all of our time and money during our Florida vacation.

Sure enough, we enjoyed Disney World a great deal, but our detour to Cypress Gardens was also a nice excursion.

It seems though that not enough other people felt the same way – Cypress Gardens was permanently closed in 2009 due to a lack of attendance. Is there really any difference between Disney and the “evil” mall developer from Hannah Montana: The Movie?

Not really.

Yet Disney still feels that as part of its family-friendly messages, it can extol the virtues of fighting against big businesses while romanticizing small businesses and idealizing small town life.

Anti-corporatism sounds really funny coming from one of the biggest, most monopolizing corporations within the Western world.

I can just picture them singing and cackling in the shadows, just like one of their devious cartoon villains.